SOURCE: Donovan, Stephen. “In Darkest England and the Way Out: Imagining Empire, Imagining Britain.” Moderna Språk 93, no. 1 (1999): 12-23.

In the following essay, Donovan discusses the English reception of Henry Morton Stanley's In Darkest Africa in 1890; examines the exposé of poverty in Britain that it inspired, William Thomas Stead's In Darkest England; and argues that the imperialist ideology was a result of the experiences, conflicts, and contradictions of capitalist Britain.

… it is worth pausing to ask why small incidents in such an out of the way place as the trackless depths of a primeval forest should remind one of thoughts of friends and their homes in England.

—Henry Morton Stanley, In Darkest Africa (1890)

The exceedingly bitter cry of the disinherited has become to be as familiar in the ears of men as the dull roar of the streets or as the moaning of the wind through the trees...